Male Excel is a first-of-its-kind online clinic that provides access to treatments and licensed medical providers without ever leaving home. They came to Salted Stone to create a custom SMS integration solution to streamline their automated customer outreach using workflows and a custom-coded SMS API solution.
Salted Stone utilized HubSpot Operations Hub to develop custom-coded workflow steps that connected the SMS vendor’s API to HubSpot to send customers timely reminders via SMS in the same workflow as automated email.
Male Excel is built on a 100% online platform to provide care that is more efficient and accessible to its customers and patients. Because of the sensitive nature of health-related data in the CRM, this custom-coded integration is needed to connect marketing automation happening with HubSpot with several other proprietary systems.
“Working with Salted Stone has revolutionized our customer outreach. Their expertise with HubSpot Operations Hub has allowed us to integrate SMS communications seamlessly into our workflows, ensuring our patients receive timely and personalized messages. This collaboration has enhanced our operational efficiency and patient engagement”.
— Phil Bochman, Digital Marketing Specialist, Male Excel
The Challenge
Male Excel was already working with HubSpot as part of their marketing tech stack because they knew it was an easy-to-use CRM to power their marketing automation. They enlisted Salted Stone to help figure out how to integrate their external SMS platform, Twilio, without a native integration option to use HubSpot workflows to trigger SMS messages to customers. The Salted Stone team created a two-workflow solution using the custom-coded action steps in Operations Hub with Twilio’s API documentation to achieve a streamlined communication outreach flow where email and SMS messages could be automated alongside email in one place.
The first step was to identify what actions in the CRM would trigger the SMS send action in HubSpot’s workflows. Because Male Excel also uses an external proprietary CRM to track and send communications to customers, Salted Stone had to ensure that records would update in both HubSpot and Twilio. The solution also needed to accommodate for scalability and a potential high volume of messages that would need to be managed.
The next step involved using Twilio’s API documentation to create a custom code snippet that could be added to the HubSpot workflows via Operations Hub functions to facilitate the outgoing SMS messages. From there, Salted Stone created one workflow to execute the custom-coded action and set up a custom property to trigger that workflow any time an SMS field was populated in HubSpot.
Salted Stone Solutions
Salted Stone’s Solutions team used HubSpot’s custom properties and a two-workflow solution to create a property to hold the content of the SMS messages and trigger the initial workflow automation. This custom property enrolled contacts when populated, which then checked the CRM database for a corresponding known Phone Number. If those criteria were met, a custom-coded workflow action enabled the connection to Twilio to send the SMS message and log it in HubSpot.
“Having one core workflow to trigger the SMS API rather than custom code each individual SMS step in the nurture workflow helped us make this solution scalable”, said Alden Dale, Salted Stone’s Director of Solutions. “While our immediate use case was for a single communication stream, we knew that Male Excel wanted to future-proof this solution to use in other streams. This approach means we don’t have to custom code each step in every workflow we create, making it more efficient and easy to use over time”.
For this customized SMS action to trigger within any workflow, the custom property value must be set from any workflow step. This approach enables the SMS message content to include custom CRM tokens like names and remarketing links that can be tracked to measure the performance of campaigns.
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Additionally, Salted Stone’s solution ensured that the corresponding SMS messages would be logged to contact records as a Logged SMS Activity that includes the content of the message.
The Results
All of Male Excel’s communications can now be facilitated and tracked in HubSpot so it’s clear which channels patients have engaged with. This custom solution also allowed Male Excel to keep using their established SMS vendor, Twilio, to keep their technology stack consolidated. Because other functions of the business already used Twilio, it was important to keep track of SMS activity within the same platform.
The Male Excel team is also now able to create reports and gain insights into SMS activity alongside all the other marketing activities happening in HubSpot. In the short term, a long-awaited nurture flow was able to go live. In the long term, the custom workflow enabled by HubSpot’s Operations Hub functionality will allow Male Excel to scale their SMS outreach all in a single platform.
“Salted Stone provided a streamlined, scalable solution that seamlessly integrated our SMS platform with HubSpot. Their approach made our customer outreach more efficient and adaptable for future growth”, continued Phil.
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